“Conjoined Destinies”: The Poetics and Politics of Black Migrations in Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello

Jason Allen-Paisant in Self-Portrait as Othello moves unflinchingly through complex histories and genealogies that widen to include Jamaica, Venice, Italy, France, and elsewhere and to locate the duppy manifestations of an unburied past in the pervasive precariousness of Black life. Across his poems, he tracks the chaotic reverberations of intergenerational traumas that persist across time, space and collective memory. This paper contends that the poet, through his use of allusion evident in his grafting and borrowings of other stories, literary syncretism, the symbolism of foreignness and its mysterious power, back and forth journeys through Europe and into homelands (Jamaica), procures an integrated circuit of Black meaning and kindred relations. This interconnectedness lays bare the sociohistorical conditions that have and continue to circumscribe and assault Black lives and deconstructs the perpetuity of anti-Black systems in the modern Western world. For all his worldly travels, the poet-narrator situates himself in an interstitial zone where each crossroad leads to new possibilities and affirmative energy. Allen-Paisant thus offers a way to reconcile a vicious history of Black xenophobia while procuring moments and processes to make peace with rupturous spaces, which necessitates a return to his homeland. However, homecoming complicates the search for self and the idea of return draws him into a dialogue with the fragmented inheritances of his past. He ultimately achieves coherence and fresh understandings through images of sterility and barrenness which he re-purposes as a foundation to make bold leaps of faith across uncertain chasms. This paper thus argues that for the poet of the African diaspora, who aspires to recover a long and complex spiritual history, the interface between domestic and international dramas highlights the luminous transcendence embodied in the journey along complicated routes and the steadfast pursuit of ideas that illuminate the deepest insights about identity, culture and the Black experience.